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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

People severely underestimate how powerful the gaming economy is.

Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint.

Gaming is what drives new hardware development, is what drives new personal computer ownership, and is what drives operating system preference.

For everyone else - a 10 year old computer does the job just fine... and it doesn't really matter what OS it happens to run.

Imagine if Apple had made it a point to dominate gaming too. Suddenly the folks spending $2-5K on a top of the line gaming machine would be forking it over for the latest generation of $5k Apple Desktops.

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If it were not for clunky game support, the day of the Linux desktop would have arrived decades ago.

It is a TON better than it was twenty years ago when I first played with no longer dual booting and running only Linux.

Proton plays almost all of the games I care about, and the games it doesn't play I can either reboot to Windows for or I can run a Windows VM with GPU passthrough.

So much easier than chasing patches to Wine and bashing your head against the wall to get even simple things running.

Agreed, I'm no stranger to Linux, and also use a MacBook for work, but when I come home I just want to play a bit of Diablo 4 or whatever and chill. I would have switched years and years ago.

Got hooked on Microsoft as early as the DOS days by playing games as a kid. They earned a customer for life indirectly there. Maybe Adobe helped a bit too.

I gave up windows the day i learned that minecraft ran perfectly well on linux. More than a decade later, i have never felt the need to go back, but it all depends on the types of games you play.

>Gaming is what made Windows dominate personal computing - not Word, Excel or Powerpoint.

Being the default OS is what made Windows dominate personal computing. The average person doesn't think about what OS they use at all, even when they're thinking about getting a Macbook.

I suggest you go an read some of the blog post by Alex St. John, one of the original DirectX developers, explaining why they were task with creating DirectX in the first place..

And anyway, the the Windows dominance was cemented way, way before Macbooks even existed, at a time when people were very much thinking about the OS they were using..

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